Will using solid cable drop performance

[ryan711]

Hey all I was thinking on getting xbox live and my room is down the hall from the office so what i wanted to do is get some cheap cat5e solid cable and run it under the carpet and what not to conceal it and someone told me that solid is really only good for behind walls and the like. Could i do this without a HUGE performance drop.

 

[plucnik]

Cat 5 cable is good for 100 meters before there's a performance drop.

 

[10forcash]

Although CAT5e is ok for up to 100 metres(ish), I would not reccomend running it under carpets etc. the CAT5 spec relies on the twist of the pairs to reduce capacitance and crosstalk, if a cable becomes deformed or damaged by traffic over it, thiswould cause a slowdown in performance at best or dropped / corrupted packets before the link failed completely. note that a 'lights on' link does not necassarily indicate a correctly operating link. I have used a flat CAT5e cable before for this purpose, although this was from a UK manufacturer and was not cheap, it also requires special termination boxes. If you have cavity floors, is it possible to feed standard CAT5e through this ?
Cheers,
10forcash

 

[JohnWill]

Actually, solid cable is the proper cable for long runs, and is the cable type that the 100 meter specification for Ethernet was written around. Stranded cable should only be used for much shorter runs, such as from the wall jack to the computer. I agree with the recommendation that you don't put it under a carpet where it will be walked on, it will die a quick death I would imagine.